Week 4 Assignment

Reading

They Say / I Say Part 1
Summary Writing (you are not required to do the exercises)
Writing Summaries

Lecture

Citation Generators

Videos

How to write a summary (This video explains how to write a summary essay, which is not exactly what you're being asked to do. It's still helpful, though.)
How to Summarize an Article (Weird computerized voice, but useful information.)

Apparently Microsoft Office has an auto summary feature. I haven't used it, nor do I recommend it, but if you want to play around with it, there are the instructions: http://youtu.be/rKZJkvoyUDI

Students will be able to:

• identify the thesis, summarize the text, recognize rhetorical devices such as parallelism, and comprehend metaphorical language.
  
• describe, evaluate, and question the purpose, audience, organization, and style of assigned readings, as well as determine a writer’s background, historical period, and cultural niche for discussion of bias, diversity or shifting perspectives.
  
• carry out a research plan which entails identification of research questions, location and evaluation of sources, selection of quotes, and avoidance of plagiarism.
  
• demonstrate control of college-level writing skills by crafting and revising cogent, lucid arguments. The student’s writing will exhibit logical, clear thinking, control of meaning, maturity of style, and appropriate tone.
  
• employ thesis statements, topic sentences, supporting data, introductions, and conclusions. They will effectively incorporate source material located during research.
  
• demonstrate appropriate skill in common writing conventions, including standard written American English, and correct MLA documentation and formatting.

Introduction

Next week (NOT this week) you'll be preparing an annotated bibliography. There are a couple of unique expectations for an annotated bibliography. First, there will be a list of citations that must be prepared in MLA format. Second, each annotation will require a summary of the source. So this week we're going to discuss how to go about doing summaries and how to prepare a MLA style reference citations.

To complete the discussions this week you will need one high-quality source that is related to your own research subject/issue. If you don't already have one, finding one should be your first step.

As stated before, marijuana reform is the subject of the examples in this class. That means that no one may use marijuana as a subject. You should continue to work with the subject you selected in the Week 1 assignment.

4a - Discussion: Summary Writing - Graded

You will need to make at least 3 posts in this discussion.

A summary should be a concise, shortened version of the original. It's only going to be about 20% or so of the length of the original, and it needs to contain all the critical information in the original, so it will take a bit of practice to perfect this particular writing style. You should incorporate some of the templates from Part 1 in They Say / I Say because they are particularly appropriate to summarization. Your post must also have an accurate, properly prepared, MLA style citation.

Note: One does not argue with the author when summarizing an article. One simply attempts to express the author's claims and reasons as accurately as possible.

First, you will need to locate an article related to your subject/issue. Then you will summarize that article. After posting your own summary, discuss with others the differences between summary writing and other types of writing that may have involved the incorporation of sources.

Example

Ed Revis believes that marijuana laws should not be changed. In "Keep Weed Illegal!" he says that positions on drug use are "extremely subjective," but that marijuana is "part of a larger web of narcotics." Revis offers three reasons why marijuana laws should not be changed. First, he claims that "significant progress" has been made with "cocaine use" down by "70 percent," and "95 percent of Americans do not use drugs." Second, he claims that Marinol is "a legal and safe version of medical marijuana." Lastly, Revis claims that "government spending on drug control is minimal." He compares the difficulty of controlling drug use to the difficulty of overcoming problems in education or eliminating poverty.

Work Cited

Revis, Ed. "Keep Weed Illegal!" The Next Great Generation, 28 July 2010. Web. 30 Jan. 2012. <http://www.thenextgreatgeneration.com/2010/07/keep-weed-illegal-heres-why/>.

4b - Discussion: Using Citation Generators - Graded

You will need to make at least 3 posts in this discussion.

After doing the initial task, discuss with others what you discovered about using citation generators.

Trust me! Using a citation generator can save you hours of work. It doesn't mean you can ignore learning the rules of MLA citations, but it does mean the drafting of those citations can be easier, leaving you only responsible for editing the drafts to conform to MLA style.

For this discussion you should use one source related to your own research subject/issue. You can use the same one you use for the summary writing discussion. Prepare a draft of the citation for that source using at least 3 different citation generators. Then, prepare a corrected version of the citation, determine which of the citation generators was most accurate and easy to use, and explain what corrections were necessary to make the draft citation conform to MLA style.

Citation Generators

Example

Easybib draft:

Fox, Steve, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert. Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Pub., 2009. Scribd. Web. <http://www.scribd.com/doc/30178916/Marijuana-Is-Safer>.

Bibme draft:

Fox, Steve, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert. Marijuana is safer: so why are we driving people to drink?. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Pub. Co., 2009. Print.

Son of Citation Machine draft:

Fox, Steve, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert. Marijuana is Safer: So Why are We Driving People to Drink?. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Pub., 2009. eBook. <http://www.scribd.com/doc/30178916/Marijuana-Is-Safer>.

Corrected citation:

Fox, Steve, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert. Marijuana is Safer: So Why are We Driving People to Drink?. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Pub., 2009. Scribd. <http://www.scribd.com/doc/30178916/Marijuana-Is-Safer>.

Each of the three drafts had errors.

The Son of Citation Machine was most correct, and it's likely because it was necessary for me to manually enter all parts of the citation. As long as I entered the correct information, the citation was likely to end up correct. The one thing Son of Citation Machine did not have a place for was the site name where the book was published online, so I had to change "eBook" to "Scribd." It would be very easy to introduce typographical errors into a Son of Citation Machine draft.

Easybib was the next closest to correct. It capitalized every word in the title, and that's not consistent with MLA format. Bibme did well, but it capitalized the title like it was an APA citation, and it didn't have any place where I could identify the book as being an online version.